A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • So great a cloud of witnesses

    Chris, the Lutheran Zephyr, is wrestling with the question of asking the saints to pray for us.

    For me this falls under the category of “all may, none must.” I can see why some are uncomfortable with it, and I wouldn’t presume to judge someone else’s piety.

    The argument that it’s permissible is, I think, pretty straightforward: We ask fellow Christians to pray for us, and we have no reason to think that death severs our communion with the Christians who’ve gone before us. As Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has put it, “the New Testament hardly permits us to think that death can sever the fellowship of believers — and the eucharistic prayers also of Protestant bodies explicitly deny that it does.” So, there’s no insuperable theological reason for not asking the saints to pray for us.

    I can see how, in practice, devotion to the saints can and has led to abuses. But the abuse of a thing is not a compelling argument against its proper use. Many good things in Christendom have been subject to abuse: confession, the Mass itself, and so on. We might even suspect that things which are very good and valuable are particularly prone to abuse since they’re so important in people’s lives.

    Which is why, I think, the best way to get over worries about invoking the saints (if one wants to get over it) is to actually do it. Although Mariology is a different, though obviously not unrelated, issue, one thing that I think has helped me gain a better understanding of it is by actually incorporating some Marian devotions into my prayer life. I’ve found the Angelus to be a good place to start. It’s beautiful, brief, and easily incorporated into one’s daily routine (the tradition is to recite it morning, noon, and evening). It’s also very Scriptural and Christocentric, being a commemoration of the Incarnation and of our salvation and hope in Jesus.

  • Superiority complex

    Time blogger Joe Klein has produced a couple of posts purporting to identify the characteristics of “right-wing extremists” and “left-wing extremists.” LWEs hate America, capitalism, mom and apple pie, while RWEs think America and capitalism are never in the wrong, that universal health care equals socialism, etc. Determining to what extent these stereotypes match up with actual people who hold power and influence I leave as an exercise for the reader.

    However, another one of Klein’s marks of a RWE is that he or she “believes that there are inferior religions.” By this standard, virtually everyone in the world is a RWE. For instance, is there anyone, even atheists, agnostics, or whoever, who doesn’t believe there is more truth in Buddhism or Christianity than, say, Scientology? Maybe there are some who profess to believe that all religions are bunk through and through and that there is no meaningful differences between them, but this must be a rare breed.

    It’s also puzzling to claim that it’s a sign of “extremism” to hold that one’s beliefs are true and that the denials of those beliefs are false. While I’m certainly sympathetic to the view that the world’s great religions have more in common than is immediately apparent, it would seem rash to conclude a priori that there are no meaningful differences in the claims they make about reality. If a particular Buddhist denies that ultimate reality can be meaningfully described as a personal being, doesn’t she ipso facto disagree with her Christian friend who affirms this very thing? And isn’t she committed to the view that, in that respect at least, he religion is “superior” to her friend’s?

    Note that this is a different issue from whether one should respect the beliefs of others. I happen to take the view that a variety of positions about the nature of reality and human beings’ relation to it can be rationally held. That doesn’t mean they can all be true; where there are genuine incompatibilities, at most one can be right. But our epistemic situation appears to be such that we can’t publicly demonstrate the manifest superiority of a single view in a way that will convince all reasonable people. We can and should acknowledge the fact that reasonable people of good will and deep moral sensibility can come to conclusions different from ours. But none of that changes the fact that to believe x is to deny not-x, and that if I believe x, then I hold that to believe x is superior to believing not-x (since, other things being equal, it’s better to believe truth than falsehood).

    It’s interesting, and perhaps significant, that people apply standards to religious belief that they apply in virtually no other area. Take politics. Like religion it involves longstanding disagreements that are resistant to any lasting solution. And hopefully most of us would acknowledge that there are people who don’t share our political beliefs who are nevertheless just as thoughtful, morally sensitive, well-informed, etc. as we are (moreso in many cases!). And yet, recognizing that in no way commits us to being relativists about politics, does it? Does recognizing that there are smart and decent people who disagree with me about abortion, or the minimum wage, or single-payer health care or whatever mean that I would be wrong – and even extremist! – to hold that my views are “superior” to theirs? If I didn’t regard them as superior in what sense would they even by my views?

    True tolerance, it seems to me, doesn’t mean denying that we disagree about things. It means recognizing disagreement and finding ways to respect each other and live together anyway.

  • Lent for nerds or The desire to possess as alienation from God

    Part of my Lenten fast is that I’m not going to buy any books. This may sound silly, but I’ve found that I often crave books in the way that other people might crave a new pair of shoes or something for their house. Although I (eventually!) read most of the books I buy, I think there’s some deeper and more disreputable feeling that buying stuff serves to alleviate. A sort of anxiousness that the new possession momentarily drives away. Or maybe an Is this a relic of our evolutionary past where securing an important article might have meant the difference between life and death? Or is it an artifact of our capitalist economy and the need to generate new “needs”?

    I’ve also pledged to get rid of some of the books I already have. This has a practical dimension since we’re going to be moving in a few months, but hopefully the letting go of things is a way to combat the desire to possess. I have this pet theory that the anxiousness associated with our desire for security is a important symptom of original sin. Our intended state is to trust our heavenly Father for all that we need, but in our alienation from and inability to trust God we cling to things in a distorted way, and often resort to evil means to secure our being and worth. “Security,” whether it be financial or national, is something of a shibboleth in our culture. By contrast, Jesus’ admonition not to worry about what we will wear or where our food will come from seems the height of hippie irresponsibility.

    The ability to live in this way, though, would have to arise out of a reorientation of our relationship with God. Luther pointed out that, apart from revelation, we’re just as likely to imagine that God has it in for us as that he’s our loving father. So at least one reason for the Incarnation is to demonstrate God’s love for us and to create trust (a.k.a. faith) in us whereby we can live in a restored relationship with God. And the fruit of that restored relationship should be less anxiety about securing our place in this world. This, in turn, should allow us to sit more lightly to what we have, share more freely, and live more joyfully. Given the stubborn persistence of the old Adam, I think we can expect this to be a constant struggle, and one of the benefits of a season like Lent is that we can practice at it.

  • Into Great Silence

    This documentary, about the life of a group of Carthusian monks living in the French Alps sounds really fascinating.

  • Up from atheism

    Warning: lengthy post ahead!

    I first became a professed atheist at about age 15; I decided that I had seen through all the illusions of those around me, those unthinking, dogmatic, hypocritical, narrow-minded small-town types I had grown up with. I literally announced to my parents that I would no longer be attending church (I had been baptized in a Reformed congregation and my family had attended both a Presbyterian and a Methodist church at various times during my childhood) and that I didn’t believe all that stuff.

    It’s always difficult to really understand why we do anything, I think, and this was no exception. In retrospect I think I was a pretty smart kid who wanted to rebel in some way. Not that I was particularly “rebellious” in any conventional sense: in high school I never drank alcohol or did drugs, and I only had one girlfriend for most of that time. My preferred forms of rebellion were musical (heavy metal, punk rock, angry political rap), sartorial (combat boots, Ramones t-shirt, partly shaved head), and intellectual (atheism, and an adolescent form of general anti-authoritarianism – I remember a friend and I mocking the pro (first) Gulf War propaganda we were fed daily by the in-class “news” program Channel 1). Even “bad” kids – the kind that hung out at the guard rail at the edge of the school parking lot in their Ozzy t-shirts smoking cigarettes – were shocked by open professions of atheism.

    What religious formation I’d had was fairly lukewarm. As I mentioned, the churches we attended were mainline Protestant, but of a fairly staid and traditional stripe. I went to Sunday school at Hillside Presbyterian, sat through what seemed to me like interminable sermons, and went to Vacation Bible School in the summers. I have no tales of fundamentalist horrors; it was the kind of innocuous, respectable mainstream Protestantism that seems to be largely disappearing (for better or worse) in our polarized age. Or at least that’s how I remember it. So, this was no grand gesture of rebellion against a stultifying and oppressive upbringing.

    Anyway, atheism fit with my overall self-image. I liked to think of myself as being more reflective and critical than my peers. I used to no doubt bore my girlfriend to tears with my pontifications on why religion was bunk (too bad there were no blogs then; the poor girl might’ve been spared). I even got into hot water with her parents for (according to them) turning her against religion! (Ironically, the Lutheran Church her family attended is one I now periodically worship at when visiting home.) In high school English I read Joyce, Thoreau, and Huxley and identified with their nonconformist ethos. By senior year I was proudly brandishing my copy of Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ (whether I understood it is another matter). I can only assume that I was pretty insufferable at times.

    By the time I got to college at a state university in northwestern Pennsylvania I was confirmed in my atheism. It simply hadn’t ocurred to me at this point that there was really anything to be said for religion: religion weighed people down with guilt and irrational prohibitions on essentially harmless activities, and it was based on an intellectually unsupportable edifice.

    My first year of college I majored in art. I had aspirations of being an illustrator, maybe even drawing comic books (I was a comic geek from way back). But by the end of my freshman year I was having second thoughts. I had some really good friends who were English majors, and I flirted with switching over, but I had also taken an intro to philosophy course, and that hooked me. Althought the course focused almost entirely on Marxism(!) I was intrigued by the idea of wrestling with the great problems of meaning and existence. By sophomore year I was enrolled as a philosophy major.

    I imagine that many people’s idea of philosophy is that, if anything, it’s likely to turn people against religion. But in my case, as I read Plato, Augustine, the Bhagavad-Gita, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, William James, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Tillich, Miguel de Unamuno, Nikolai Berdyaev, Jacques Maritain, Josiah Royce, Pascal, C.S. Lewis, and a host of others I became less and less convinced that only fools and ignoramuses could believe in a world beyond this one. You may reply that this is a lesson that any normal person would naturally learn as they mature, but I can be a little thick.

    I wish I could say I had an “Aha!” moment where I suddenly became convinced that God exists. Or that I had discovered the one knock-down argument that would convince all rational people of the reality of the divine. Alas, no such luck (though, I did for a brief period of time think that Charles Hartshorne’s version of the ontological argument was sound; I still think there’s something to that…). But what now seems just as important was that I came to see religious belief as something far more substantial and worthy of consideration than my condescending adolescent caricatures would’ve led me to believe. What I thought were knock-down objections turned out to be problems that believers had been considering for hundreds of years and had developed sophisticated responses to. And, moreover, materialistic naturalism, I now started to realize, was far from being a problem-free worldview. Was it able to account for mind, purpose, and value? For the existence and order of the universe itself?

    I had also been impressed by the tradition that I associate with Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Kierkegaard and others that emphasizes the limitations of our ability to adequately grasp the truth due to our finitude and sin. This is necessary, I think, to balance an overconfident rationalism or dogmatism. All our worldviews have limitations and it’s not obvious that one is demonstrably superior to all the others. The western theistic tradition at it’s best seems to balance the need for confident assertion with the recognition of mystery.

    This is what you might call the “negative” value of philosophy for faith. It can clear away intellectual obstacles to belief, even if it can’t create faith. For me, at least, that was an important step. Though still not a believer, I’d become convinced that the claims of religion were at least worth investigating further.

    I should note that during this entire time I hadn’t set foot in a church for any reason except maybe for the odd wedding. The first time I spent any considerable time in church as an adult came during a trip to England and Ireland during the summer before my senior year in college. As someone from a doughty Protestant background, this was really my first exposure to the beauty of traditional Catholicism. In Dublin I saw the Book of Kells on display at Trinity College and visited Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Although I didn’t worship as such, I was moved in a way I didn’t expect and made aware of the experiential and aesthetic aspects of religion that I had previously ignored. This was only a small part of the trip, but it made an impact on me.

    By the time I left college I had moved firmly into agnosticism (if you can be firmly agnostic!). After a year of work I pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Purdue University in Indiana. I had at least a vague idea that I was interested in philosophy of religion, but took several courses in historical philosophy, delving more deeply into the medievals and the early moderns in particular, as well as 20th century analytic philosophy.

    The kind of philosophy I was being trained in combined analytical rigor with a close attention to historical texts. In other words, I was taught that we can’t dismiss someone just because they lived a long time ago (“the democracy of the dead” in Chesterton’s words) and that we should take their arguments seriously, not just read them as historical curiosities. I struggled with Augustine on free will, St. Thomas on God’s existence, Aristotle and Leibniz on ontology, and Moore and Wittgenstein on knowledge. I was fortunate to be taught by some incredibly sharp people, and, in a few cases, people who were also professing Christians. This challenged me both to become more rigorous in my thinking and to take Christian theism seriously as a live option.

    Again without any major ephiphanies I gradually became convinced that something like classical theism was the best metaphysics going. It just seemed (and seems) to me like the most satisfying explanation for the existence and order of the universe, the fact that we have minds and they find the world intelligible, the existence of truth, beauty, and goodness, our moral aspirations, the occurrence of well-attested religious and mystical experience and the holiness of the saints of all traditions. Not that it doesn’t have its problems, but it seems to me to have fewer problems than its main rivals. T.S. Eliot once reputedly said that he embraced Christianity because it was the least false of the options available to him. I wouldn’t go that far, but there’s definitely an element of skepticism and, hopefully, humility in my embrace of Christian theism.

    This all sounds very intellectualisitic, and I don’t mean to give the impression that I spent every minute of my twenties pondering the imponderables (though I guess as a philosophy student that was part of my job description.). I can’t really say what sort of other things were going on in my life that might’ve affected my thought processes, though undoubtedly personal factors played an important role.

    I had experimented with going to church on a couple of occassions in the late 90s, but it never really took. In fact, it wasn’t until shortly before my wedding (in the winter of 2000) that I began to attend church regularly, and this largely out of obligation. At that time I probably would’ve described myself as a kind of theistic Platonist, but not a Christian. But it turned out that, at least in my case, there was something to Pascal’s advice to “Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you – will quiet your proudly critical intellect.” I’d probably put it differently, but the simple discipline of going to church week in and week out gradually had an affect on me.

    Sometime in 2001, precipitated in part by a serious medical issue in the life of a friend, I realized that I believed that Jesus is the Son of God and went into a church near the office where I worked and prayed to him. It wasn’t quite the classic “sinner’s prayer” moment, but I would call it a conversion experience, with the caveat that a lot of groundwork had been laid. In some ways I guess it was an explicit acknowledgement of something that had been going on under surface for some time.

    Since then my religious life has been pretty much bereft of dramatic incident. I’ve attended various Lutheran churches over the course of the last five years up until this past summer when, having just moved to Boston, my wife and I began attending the Church of the Advent (Episcopal). Lutheranism at its best seems to me to combine catholicity of doctrine and worship with the Augustinian understanding of finitude, sin, and grace that comports so well with my skepticism. In doctrinal matters I’m pretty conventional: I don’t have much of an itch for revisionism in Christology or the doctrine of the Trinity (Chalcedon and Nicea sit just fine with me), Atonement (I think some combination of Anselm and Abelard is probably as close to the truth as we’re likely to get), or other doctrinal matters. If anything, the challenge for me now is to rest in the faith of the church and get down to the business of actually living a Christian life. Thinking about religion, however necessary and important, can be a temptation to neglect things like prayer, service, doing justice and loving mercy, developing the virtues of faith, hope, and charity – those sorts of things.

  • Plantinga on Dawkins and Calvinism and (vs?) philosophy

    Alvin Plantinga, probably the most important contemporary Christian philosopher working in the analytic tradition, has a lengthy review of Dawkins’ God Delusion.

    I have to say that I have almost no appetite for these back-and-forth polemics; I was an atheist for a considerable period of time and don’t feel much need to revisit it. But you always learn something from reading Plantinga. Here he deploys his trademark self-refutation argument against naturalism, an argument which I think has a good deal to be said for it (C.S. Lewis famously deployed a similar argument in his book Miracles, as did Stephen R.L. Clark in his Gifford Lectures).

    Also of interest to the philosophically-inclined, there’ve been a series of discussions on the Generous Orthodoxy: Thinktank site about theologians and theistic philosophers, specifically about why the latter don’t seem attracted to the Calvinism that’s making something of a resurgence in evangelical circles. In particular, most analytic philosophers who are theists, even ones from Reformed backgrounds (like, say, Alvin Plantinga), defend libertarian views of free will, which is at odds with the traditional Calvinist view. It’s interesting to see the different ways in which philosophers and theologians approach these issues.

  • They’ve got personality

    Jon Katz writes the series Rural Life for Slate.com; he’s a writer who started his own farm with his wife and now writes about it.

    One of his recurring themes is the intelligence and personality of farm animals and how human interaction can affect them. Today’s entry is about a sassy hen named Henrietta and the way she interacts with people and other animals. She perches on the donkey, plays hide-and-seek with the barn cat, and generally behaves in ways not typical for your average hen.

    Katz writes that

    Henrietta is the most recent subject of the unofficial study I’ve been conducting to see if how we treat farm animals can affect their personalities. Animals of the same species can behave very differently, yet there’s little research that explains why. Genetics is a factor, so are health and environment. And I’m coming to believe that humans can also shape the natures of domesticated animals, even creatures that seem to lack individuality.

    This reminds me of a suggestion once made by C.S. Lewis. He said that, in entering into relationships with human beings, animals can in some way participate in human personal life, and maybe even enjoy a postmortem existence having been “taken up” into the lives of their human friends. Stephen Webb, a theologian who has written two books about our relationships to animals, holds up the domesticated animal as in some ways the paradigm of animal existence; the telos of animals is to be taken into community with human beings, and ultimately God.

    It makes a certain amount of sense that if you treat animals like machines or objects, then that’s what they’ll become, but if you treat them like fellow beings with whom some kind of relationship is possible, then who knows what might develop? We hear stories of the saints talking to, bargaining with, and preaching to wild animals, in some ways anticipating the eschatological reality of a restored creation.

    On the other hand, though, I think this needs to be balanced with a sense of the wildness of animals, and a respect for their otherness. Presumably animals have their own worlds of experience which would be as foreign to us as ours would be to them, were we able to experience them (what’s it like to be a bat?). There are kingdoms of which we know very little, and a bit of humility presumably wouldn’t be out of place.

  • Simplicity and Lent

    I’ve recently started reading a book called Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth by Jim Merkel. Merkel worked for years as an engineer designing weapons systems for arms dealers(!) until, one day, sitting in a bar in Sweden he watched the tv coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Struck by his (and everyone’s) complicity in the lifestyle that made such a disaster possible, he went back to California and went from being “a jet-set military salesman who voted for Regan” to “a bleeding-heart pacifist, eco-veggie-head-hooligan”: he quit his job, and began to use his engineer’s brain to calculate how he could live in a way that reduced his ecological footprint to sustainable levels. The first part of the book describes his research into the theoretical underpinnings of more sustainable ways of living, while the second part offers tips for putting it into practice.

    I’m not an ecological catastrophist, but I’m also not not an ecological catastrophist. I think global warming is real, but I also think it’s possible that we may develop some kind of technological fix. But it’s hard to escape the sense that we’re living on borrowed time and that we won’t be able to dodge the bullet forever, whatever form it comes in (peak oil? avian flu? mad cow disease?). So, there’s certainly a case to be made that it behooves all of us to reduce our footprint, even if most of us aren’t going to go as far as Jim Merkel (though I’m open to arguments that we should).

    But given that it is Lent, I think there’s also a spiritual dimension to the practice of simplicity that’s worth thinking about. Even if living more simply isn’t necessarty to stave off ecological disaster, it’s hard to overlook the fact that a modest lifestyle has been commended by sages of all traditions. Plato and Aristotle along with the Church fathers and doctors, were pretty much of one voice in commending simplicity, moderation, and frugality (and parallels in other traditions are easily spotted). As C.S. Lewis once observed, our society is unique not in the pursuit of wealth, but in upholding it as one of the highest goods, in opposition to the virtually unanimous counsel of our tradition.

    I tend to think of the fasting of Lent as intended in part to create a “space” in our lives where God can be present. There’s a traditional line of thought which says that, since God is by definition present everywhere, the barrier to our awareness of that presence lies in us. And one way of building that barrier is by filling up our lives with distractions. Blaise Pascal (the inspiration for this blog’s title) said with typical hyperbole that “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” I take this to mean that our penchant for distraction makes us unable to perceive reality as it really is.

    Simplicity as a spiritual discipline (which needn’t, it seems to me, be sharply distinguished from doing it for other reasons) might then be understood as an attempt to “cleanse the doors of perception.” Part of our problem is that we tend not to see reality as it really is, but instead as something for us. Instead of affirming reality with Augustine’s “being qua being is good” we ask “what’s in it for me?” This is arguably the root of our mistreatment of nature; we see it primarily as a resource for our use rather than as a gift and something that has intrinsic value. Perhaps the practice of simplicity can be a way of “letting things be” and seeing them as the handiwork of a loving Creator.

    On a more practical level, giving up something – a food, an activity, etc. – can allow us to spend more time doing the things we are always struggling to make time for, like prayer or helping others. I know I could certainly stand to spend more time doing both of those things. Lent seems like a good time to reflect on how I could live more simply, and hopefully this book will be of some help.

  • A veggie Lent

    Perhaps as one of your Lenten disciplines you’ve decided to give up meat (our Orthodox bothers and sisters go full-on vegan for
    Lent). If so, you may be wondering “What am I going to eat for the next 40 days?” Well, The Order of Santa Ignora has got you covered.

    Who knows, you might like it so much you’ll decide to make it a year-round thing.

  • More on giving teeth to JWT

    In a comment to the previous post, Michael Westmoreland-White asks a fair question of Just War theory:

    Has JWT EVER led to massive civil disobedience and refusal to fight on the part of a church’s members? Pacifists have often been arrested or executed for refusing to fight. When has this been true of JWTers? CAN the doctrine be given “teeth” or will it always just be a sop to the consciences of nationalistic warriors?

    The reason this is an important question is that, if the only effect of JWT is to bless whatever wars the government undertakes, then it’s not functioning as a theory of the morality of warfare. And I think it’s fair to say that many American Christians have gone along with the state’s war plans while using the rhetoric of just war more as a fig leaf than as a critical tool. Both the mainline and evangelical churches have been guilty of buying into forms of nationalism that serve to blunt criticism of the government’s actions, especially during wartime. It’s also worth pointing out that the vast majority of Christians aren’t taking to the street to engage in civil disobedience in protest of any of the other great evils our society is complicit in, whether that be abortion, poverty, ecological degradation, or what have you.

    Still, it has to be pointed out that many Christians, both clergy and laypeople, who have protested war have done so for broadly Just War reasons. Unless we’re going to assume, for instance, that everyone who protested the Vietnam war was a committed pacifist, there must’ve been at least some cases where opposition was motivated by people concluding that the war didn’t meet the standards of a just war. And I think it’s safe to say that this has been the case in more recent years as well. The mainline churches, none of which are officially pacifist, have been very critical of the Iraq war and many of their members took part in demonstrations protesting it. Granting all that, though, it’s safe to say, I think, that JWT doesn’t provide the controlling template for how most American Christians think about war.

    Whether or not JWT can become more effective as a genuine restraint on Christians’ willingness to participate in unjust wars depends, I think, on whether it can be effectively taught. My evidence is strictly anecdotal, but my impression is that JWT is rarely taught or discussed in most congregations. No moral framework can be put into practice if it isn’t taught and received. And this is true of any morality. Sexual morality doesn’t require abstinence in all cases, but it does require the practice of restraint and discrimination, as well as the development of virtues necessary for that practice. Likewise, putting JWT into practice means not just learning a theory, but also learning the virtues of restraint, moderation, and justice as well as faith, hope, and charity. That it hasn’t been taught and internalized isn’t necessarily a knock against the theory, but a knock against us. If mainline chruches are serious about JWT, maybe a first step would be to learn from the peace churches how they reinforce and inculcate the practices of peacemaking in their members.